Today Microsoft’s Bing released a number of upgrades to its image search product, improving its performance, and, so far as I can tell in my limited testing, its user experience. According to Microsoft, image search accounts for a total of 7% of the total Bing search volume.

Whitespace has been ‘trimmed,’ while the individual size of images in a page of search results has been increased. This will be especially useful to users with small screens. On larger displays, its almost remiscent of the old Zune Player ‘Now Playing’ screen.

Mouse-over

You don’t need a Chrome add-on to do this anymore, at least in Bing Image Search: mouse over an image in the results, and it will expand, helping you get a better feel for it. This is intuitive, and pleasant. I almost wonder why it wasn’t added before.

Drill down

Bing Image Search now includes a bar of filtering options that allows for the sorting by “size, color, type, layout, and faces.” That means you can input a search and then, in theory, narrow down the results based on your preference quite quickly.

Did you really mean that? Or this?

And finally, Microsoft has baked suggestions into the experience, helping unsure users narrow their results by improving their query string.

And that’s the new Bing Image Search. Here, let me help you test it out.